Anyone out there who is fluent in agendadriventechnobureaucraticbabble want to translate this from the IPCC report into English:

"As discussed in Section 8.2.1.4.1, a recent satellite measurement (Harder et al., 2009) found much greater than expected reduction at UV wavelengths in the recent declining solar cycle phase. Changes in solar uv drive stratospheric O3 chemistry and can change RF. Haigh et al. (2010) show that if these observations are correct, they imply the opposite relationship between solar RF and solar activity over that period than has hitherto been assumed. These new measurements therefore increase uncertainty in estimates of the sign of solar RF, but they are unlikely to alter estimates of the maximum absolute magnitude of the solar contribution to RF, which remains small (Chapter 8 ). However, they do suggest the possibility of a much larger impact of solar variations on the stratosphere than previously thought, and some studies have suggested that this may lead to significant regional impacts on climate (as discussed in 10.3.1.1.3), that are not necessarily reflected by the RF metric (see 8.2.16)."http://climatefailfiles.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/ch11_near-term_wg1ar5_sod_ch11_all_final.pdf

Tropical cyclones, what about hurricanes getting worse:"Two recent reports, the SREX (IPCC, 2012; particularly Seneviratne et al., 2012) assessment and a WMO Expert Team report on tropical cyclones and climate change (Knutson et al., 2010) indicate the response of global tropical cyclone frequency to projected radiative forcing changes is likely to be either no change or a decrease of up to a third by the end of the 21st century."

The science says nothing about intensity, but on frequency, somewhere between no change and a one third decrease. One would think that a projection of up to a one third decrease in tropical cyclone frequency would be important enough to make it into the Executive Summary.

"there is no relationship between temperature and the anthropogenic anomaly, once the warming effect of solar irradiance is taken into consideration"

"greenhouse gas forcing, aerosols, solar irradiance and global temperature are not polynomially cointegrated, and the perceived relationship between these variables is a spurious regression phenomenon"

New Study Finds No Significant Human-Induced Warming

At the journal Earth System Dynamics, M. Beenstock, Y. Reingewertz, and N. Paldor have published a paper titled “Polynomial cointegration tests of anthropogenic impact on global warming” which Anthony Watts describes as a potential bombshell. The authors conducted an exhaustive statistical analysis of data from 1850 through 2007, applying the technique of cointegration, which the authors describe as follows:

Cointegration theory is based on the simple notion that time series might be highly correlated even though there is no causal relation between them. For the relation to be genuine, the residuals from a regression between these time series must be stationary, in which case the time series are “cointegrated”. Since stationary residuals mean-revert to zero, there must be a genuine long-term relationship between the series, which move together over time because they share a common trend. If on the other hand, the residuals are nonstationary, the residuals do not mean-revert to zero, the time series do not share a common trend, and the relationship between them is spurious because the time series are not cointegrated.

You can follow the link for the statistical details, but here is the authors’ conclusion:

We have shown that anthropogenic forcings do not polynomially cointegrate with global temperature and solar irradiance. Therefore, data for 1880–2007 do not support the anthropogenic interpretation of global warming during this period. This key result is shown graphically in Fig. 3 where the vertical axis measures the component of global temperature that is unexplained by solar irradiance according to our estimates. In panel a the horizontal axis measures the anomaly in the anthropogenic trend when the latter is derived from forcings of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide. In panel b the horizontal axis measures this anthropogenic anomaly when apart from these greenhouse gas forcings, it includes tropospheric aerosols and black carbon. Panels a and b both show that there is no relationship between temperature and the anthropogenic anomaly, once the warming effect of solar irradiance is taken into consideration.

This is Fig. 3a:

Interestingly, the authors also conclude that the data admit the possibility that CO2 and other “greenhouse gases” could contribute to to a temporary increase in global temperatures:

However, we find that greenhouse gas forcings might have a temporary effect on global temperature. This result is illustrated in panel c of Fig. 3 in which the horizontal axis measures the change in the estimated anthropogenic trend. Panel c clearly shows that there is a positive relationship between temperature and the change in the anthropogenic anomaly once the warming effect of solar irradiance is taken into consideration.

Other scientists will weigh in on these findings, as the debate over climate continues to rage. Still, it is increasingly clear that the most reliable and sophisticated scientific work tends to show that the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis is wrong. In that sense, it is fair to say that a consensus is emerging.

BEIJING (AP) Jan. 5 2013 -- China is experiencing unusual chills this winter with its national average temperature hitting the lowest in 28 years, and snow and ice have closed highways, canceled flights, stranded tourists and knocked out power in several provinces.

China Meteorological Administration on Friday said the national average was -3.8 degrees Celsius (25 degrees Fahrenheit) since late November, the coldest in nearly three decades.

The average temperature in northeast China dipped to -15.3 degrees C (4.5 degrees F), the coldest in 43 years

Previously on the thread we see record cold temps in China and Siberia when it was warmer in other places. The phrase global warming seems to be dead now because the warming isn't consistent or necessarily global. The climate is always changing so the term climate change is safer to use, can apply to everything and can't be disproven.

The last 5 winters in Germany were colder than 'normal'. This chart show the cooling trend since 1988:

I keep running into evidence that winter continues at least so far despite humans and their bad behaviors. Yesterday I took a long drive along the mighty Mississippi only to find it completely frozen over. Not up north where it is small but in southern Minnesota where it is a mile wide. A truck parked at at an ice fishing house prompted me to take a picture. Apologies for the quality of the shot not showing just how beautiful this is, but this is the Mighty Mississippi fully frozen over and blanketed with snow for as far as the eye can see:

A House Science Committee hearing on global warming won't go on after all — the committee's environmental subpanel has just announced that it's postponing this morning's session on climate change "due to weather."

Locally I can report the lake is still frozen and that it was a high of 34 degrees for the outdoor baseball opener yesterday, sunny and 24 right now, April 2. 28 days of March were below historical averages at the high and at the low.

Global warming right now looks like a cold, cruel hoax. From my outpost: 20 inches of ice depth, still, plus another foot of snow falling now. Last year the lake was clear of ice by March 20. 135 years ago it was clear by March 11. I took this photo across a snow covered lake in metro Mpls yesterday in sunshine. The view now is all white-out. My catamaran and kayak are patiently awaiting the change of season. The geese look a confused. Another 2-day 'winter' snowstorm all day today through tomorrow. In two months the days start getting shorter. http://minnesota.cbslocal.com/2013/04/16/lake-minnetonka-could-face-historically-late-ice-out/

In the first place, I think tornado activity is actually down. That news is no help to today's victims.

Hearts and prayers go out to the Oklahoma tornado victims. This is a HORRIBLE tragedy. Where I live people can't imagine homes without basements, that may have saved hundreds or thousands of lives in Mpls 2 years ago. Besides that people who could not get below ground for cover, another part of the story is saying that a number of children got to the school basement for safety and drowned there! This is Sandy Hook and far worse I think. Ughhh! Glenn Beck was broadcasting live from Moore, OK this morning and has a relief fund setup on his site to donate directly to help victims: http://mercuryone.fundly.com/2013-midwest-tornado-relief

All that said, on a lighter note, Newsweek predicted global cooling could cause this kind of carnage:

...the science is far from settled and that if we were honest with ourselves and wished to approach the subject with scientific rigor and impartiality, we would have to modestly agree, in his own words, that “the more we learn, the more we realize that we just do not know.

Uncertainty, however, is not synonymous with confusion or ignorance. We do not know everything or even enough, but we still know a fair amount about climate realities, as Harris’s discourse made clear. We know the long history of climatological variations, the many different factors that impinge upon and largely account for vast fluctuations in weather over the centuries and millennia, and the response of the scientific community, often, it must be said, disingenuous and repressive, to the data at its disposal.

We know, via proxies like ice core samples, fossil remains, marine specimens, temperature-dependent remanence measurements, as well as historical documents, etc., that there were periods in history when the earth was significantly warmer than it is today, though human beings were not pumping CO2 into the atmosphere — CO2 levels during the Ordovician Age 440 million years ago were ten times higher than they are at present and happened to coincide with an ice age; closer to home, during the Medieval Warm Period the Scandinavians farmed Greenland and in the Roman Warm Period olive groves flourished in Germany. We know that the Northwest Passage was open during the early part of the 20th century and that the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, as recounted in his The North West Passage, navigated the strait between 1903 and 1906. (Its “gates” have been “forced…ajar,” he writes, and “traced from end to end by one ship’s keel” — his own.)

We know that solar activity is a primary driver of climate change. We know that temperatures have stabilized since 1998 and may possibly have declined by a fraction of a degree, and that we are currently in what is defined as an “interglacial” — and in fact, temperatures recorded at the American base at the south pole show it to be colder today than when the base was established over 50 years ago. ...We know, too, that Michael Mann’s celebrated “hockey stick” graphs depicting an abrupt spike in temperatures in the recent era are fraudulent and are in process of being retired; that computer models are notoriously unreliable and are unable even to retrodict the past; that temperature reading stations are both too few and egregiously misplaced, often in urban areas and near man-made structures that capture or produce heat, thus recording misleading data; and that the media contention that the majority of the world’s scientists are firm adherents of the AGW (anthropogenic global warming) thesis is simply false.

... more than 31,000 scientists who added their signatures to the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine “petition project” in 2008, repudiating the 600 or so scientists who have signed on to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warming consensus. Further, it seems, as the petition states, “that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth,” a subject Harris also touched on but one studiously avoided by the warmists. ...We know that assessments counter to the prevailing orthodoxy have been deliberately suppressed and that the evidence for AGW was often just made up — witness the infamous “hide the decline” email dumps emanating from the mysteriously hacked Hadley Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, which have disclosed the duplicitous and counterfeit nature of its methods and procedures. The lead researcher at the East Anglia CRU, Phil Jones, has gone so far as to recommend deleting all incriminating emails and/or changing the wording of others. As I wrote in Global Warning: The Trials of an Unsettled Science, “What we are seeing is the unfolding of a Climategate scandal that, one hopes, will put paid to a vast and tenacious hoax.” The climate mavens will stoop to practically anything to defend their ideological patrimony.(more at link)

Around 1250 A.D., historical records show, ice packs began showing up farther south in the North Atlantic. Glaciers also began expanding on Greenland, soon to threaten Norse settlements on the island. From 1275 to 1300 A.D., glaciers began expanding more broadly, according to radiocarbon dating of plants killed by the glacier growth. The period known today as the Little Ice Age was just starting to poke through.

Summers began cooling in Northern Europe after 1300 A.D., negatively impacting growing seasons, as reflected in the Great Famine of 1315 to 1317. Expanding glaciers and ice cover spreading across Greenland began driving the Norse settlers out. The last, surviving, written records of the Norse Greenland settlements, which had persisted for centuries, concern a marriage in 1408 A.D. in the church of Hvalsey, today the best preserved Norse ruin.

Colder winters began regularly freezing rivers and canals in Great Britain, the Netherlands and Northern France, with both the Thames in London and the Seine in Paris frozen solid annually. The first River Thames Frost Fair was held in 1607. In 1607-1608, early European settlers in North America reported ice persisting on Lake Superior until June. In January, 1658, a Swedish army marched across the ice to invade Copenhagen. By the end of the 17th century, famines had spread from northern France, across Norway and Sweden, to Finland and Estonia.

Reflecting its global scope, evidence of the Little Ice Age appears in the Southern Hemisphere as well. Sediment cores from Lake Malawi in southern Africa show colder weather from 1570 to 1820. A 3,000 year temperature reconstruction based on varying rates of stalagmite growth in a cave in South Africa also indicates a colder period from 1500 to 1800. A 1997 study comparing West Antarctic ice cores with the results of the Greenland Ice Sheet Project Two (GISP2) indicate a global Little Ice Age affecting the two ice sheets in tandem.

The Siple Dome, an ice dome roughly 100 km long and 100 km wide, about 100 km east of the Siple Coast of Antartica, also reflects effects of the Little Ice Age synchronously with the GISP2 record, as do sediment cores from the Bransfield Basin of the Antarctic Peninsula. Oxygen/isotope analysis from the Pacific Islands indicates a 1.5 degree Celsius temperature decline between 1270 and 1475 A.D.

The Franz Josef glacier on the west side of the Southern Alps of New Zealand advanced sharply during the period of the Little Ice Age, actually invading a rain forest at its maximum extent in the early 1700s. The Mueller glacier on the east side of New Zealand’s Southern Alps expanded to its maximum extent at roughly the same time.

Ice cores from the Andeas mountains in South America show a colder period from 1600 to 1800. Tree ring data from Patagonia in South America show cold periods from 1270 to 1380 and from 1520 to 1670. Spanish explorers noted the expansion of the San Rafael Glacier in Chile from 1675 to 1766, which continued into the 19th century.

The height of the Little Ice Age is generally dated as 1650 to 1850 A.D. The American Revolutionary Army under General George Washington shivered at Valley Forge in the winter of 1777-78, and New York harbor was frozen in the winter of 1780. Historic snowstorms struck Lisbon, Portugal in 1665, 1744 and 1886. Glaciers in Glacier National Park in Montana advanced until the late 18th or early 19th centuries. The last River Thames Frost Fair was held in 1814. The Little Ice Age phased out during the middle to late 19th century.

The Little Ice Age, following the historically warm temperatures of the Medieval Warm Period, which lasted from about AD 950 to 1250, has been attributed to natural cycles in solar activity, particularly sunspots. A period of sharply lower sunspot activity known as the Wolf Minimum began in 1280 and persisted for 70 years until 1350. That was followed by a period of even lower sunspot activity that lasted 90 years from 1460 to 1550 known as the Sporer Minimum. During the period 1645 to 1715, the low point of the Little Ice Age, the number of sunspots declined to zero for the entire time. This is known as the Maunder Minimum, named after English astronomer Walter Maunder. That was followed by the Dalton Minimum from 1790 to 1830, another period of well below normal sunspot activity.

The increase in global temperatures since the late 19th century just reflects the end of the Little Ice Age. The global temperature trends since then have followed not rising CO2 trends but the ocean temperature cycles of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO). Every 20 to 30 years, the much colder water near the bottom of the oceans cycles up to the top, where it has a slight cooling effect on global temperatures until the sun warms that water. That warmed water then contributes to slightly warmer global temperatures, until the next churning cycle.

Those ocean temperature cycles, and the continued recovery from the Little Ice Age, are primarily why global temperatures rose from 1915 until 1945, when CO2 emissions were much lower than in recent years. The change to a cold ocean temperature cycle, primarily the PDO, is the main reason that global temperatures declined from 1945 until the late 1970s, despite the soaring CO2 emissions during that time from the postwar industrialization spreading across the globe.

The 20 to 30 year ocean temperature cycles turned back to warm from the late 1970s until the late 1990s, which is the primary reason that global temperatures warmed during this period. But that warming ended 15 years ago, and global temperatures have stopped increasing since then, if not actually cooled, even though global CO2 emissions have soared over this period. As The Economist magazine reported in March, “The world added roughly 100 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. That is about a quarter of all the CO2 put there by humanity since 1750.” Yet, still no warming during that time. That is because the CO2 greenhouse effect is weak and marginal compared to natural causes of global temperature changes.

At first the current stall out of global warming was due to the ocean cycles turning back to cold. But something much more ominous has developed over this period. Sunspots run in 11 year short term cycles, with longer cyclical trends of 90 and even 200 years. The number of sunspots declined substantially in the last 11 year cycle, after flattening out over the previous 20 years. But in the current cycle, sunspot activity has collapsed. NASA’s Science News report for January 8, 2013 states,

“Indeed, the sun could be on the threshold of a mini-Maunder event right now. Ongoing Solar Cycle 24 [the current short term 11 year cycle] is the weakest in more than 50 years. Moreover, there is (controversial) evidence of a long-term weakening trend in the magnetic field strength of sunspots. Matt Penn and William Livingston of the National Solar Observatory predict that by the time Solar Cycle 25 arrives, magnetic fields on the sun will be so weak that few if any sunspots will be formed. Independent lines of research involving helioseismology and surface polar fields tend to support their conclusion.”

That is even more significant because NASA’s climate science has been controlled for years by global warming hysteric James Hansen, who recently announced his retirement.

But this same concern is increasingly being echoed worldwide. The Voice of Russia reported on April 22, 2013,

“Global warming which has been the subject of so many discussions in recent years, may give way to global cooling. According to scientists from the Pulkovo Observatory in St.Petersburg, solar activity is waning, so the average yearly temperature will begin to decline as well. Scientists from Britain and the US chime in saying that forecasts for global cooling are far from groundless.”

That report quoted Yuri Nagovitsyn of the Pulkovo Observatory saying, “Evidently, solar activity is on the decrease. The 11-year cycle doesn’t bring about considerable climate change – only 1-2%. The impact of the 200-year cycle is greater – up to 50%. In this respect, we could be in for a cooling period that lasts 200-250 years.” In other words, another Little Ice Age.

The German Herald reported on March 31, 2013,

“German meteorologists say that the start of 2013 is now the coldest in 208 years – and now German media has quoted Russian scientist Dr Habibullo Abdussamatov from the St. Petersburg Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory [saying this] is proof as he said earlier that we are heading for a “Mini Ice Age.” Talking to German media the scientist who first made his prediction in 2005 said that after studying sunspots and their relationship with climate change on Earth, we are now on an ‘unavoidable advance towards a deep temperature drop.’”

“Here in Britain, where we had our fifth freezing winter in a row, the Central England Temperature record – according to an expert analysis on the US science blog Watts Up With That – shows that in this century, average winter temperatures have dropped by 1.45C, more than twice as much as their rise between 1850 and 1999, and twice as much as the entire net rise in global temperatures recorded in the 20th century.”

A news report from India (The Hindu April 22, 2013) stated, “March in Russia saw the harshest frosts in 50 years, with temperatures dropping to –25° Celsius in central parts of the country and –45° in the north. It was the coldest spring month in Moscow in half a century….Weathermen say spring is a full month behind schedule in Russia.” The news report summarized,

“Russia is famous for its biting frosts but this year, abnormally icy weather also hit much of Europe, the United States, China and India. Record snowfalls brought Kiev, capital of Ukraine, to a standstill for several days in late March, closed roads across many parts of Britain, buried thousands of sheep beneath six-metre deep snowdrifts in Northern Ireland, and left more than 1,000,000 homes without electricity in Poland. British authorities said March was the second coldest in its records dating back to 1910. China experienced the severest winter weather in 30 years and New Delhi in January recorded the lowest temperature in 44 years.”

Booker adds, “Last week it was reported that 3,318 places in the USA had recorded their lowest temperatures for this time of year since records began. Similar record cold was experienced by places in every province of Canada. So cold has the Russian winter been that Moscow had its deepest snowfall in 134 years of observations.”

Britain’s Met Office, an international cheerleading headquarters for global warming hysteria, did concede last December that there would be no further warming at least through 2017, which would make 20 years with no global warming. That reflects grudging recognition of the newly developing trends. But that reflects as well growing divergence between the reality of real world temperatures and the projections of the climate models at the foundation of the global warming alarmism of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Since those models have never been validated, they are not science at this point, but just made up fantasies. That is why, “In the 12 years to 2011, 11 out of 12 [global temperature]forecasts [of the Met Office] were too high — and… none were colder than [resulted],” as BBC climate correspondent Paul Hudson wrote in January.

Global warming was never going to be the problem that the Lysenkoists who have brought down western science made it out to be. Human emissions of CO2 are only 4 to 5% of total global emissions, counting natural causes. Much was made of the total atmospheric concentration of CO2 exceeding 400 parts per million. But if you asked the daffy NBC correspondent who hysterically reported on that what portion of the atmosphere 400 parts per million is, she transparently wouldn’t be able to tell you. One percent of the atmosphere would be 10,000 parts per million. The atmospheric concentrations of CO2 deep in the geologic past were much, much greater than today, yet life survived, and we have no record of any of the catastrophes the hysterics have claimed. Maybe that is because the temperature impact of increased concentrations of CO2 declines logarithmically. That means there is a natural limit to how much increased CO2 can effectively warm the planet, which would be well before any of the supposed climate catastrophes the warming hysterics have tried to use to shut down capitalist prosperity.

Yet, just last week, there was Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson telling us, by way of attempting to tutor Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), Chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, “For the record, and for the umpteenth time, there is no ‘great amount of uncertainty’ about whether the planet is warming and why.” If you can read, and you have gotten this far in my column, you know why Robinson’s ignorance is just another Washington Post abuse of the First Amendment. Mr. Robinson, let me introduce you to the British Met Office, stalwart of Global Warming “science,” such as it is, which has already publicly confessed that we are already three quarters through 20 years of No Global Warming!

Booker could have been writing about Robinson when he concluded his Sunday Telegraph commentary by writing, “Has there ever in history been such an almighty disconnect between observable reality and the delusions of a political class that is quite impervious to any rational discussion?”

But there is a fundamental problem with the temperature records from this contentious period, when climate science crashed into political science. The land based records, which have been under the control of global warming alarmists at the British Met Office and the Hadley Centre Climate Research Unit, and at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the U.S., show much more warming during this period than the incorruptible satellite atmosphere temperature records. Those satellite records have been further confirmed by atmospheric weather balloons. But the land based records can be subject to tampering and falsification.

Does the model fit the data? Does the warming model explain the recorded data better than other models or random fluctuations? This is a mathematical, not a measurement question or environmental question, and the answer is no.

Long, interesting story of trying to get an answer to the above question from the meteorological office of Britain (The Met Office), also posed in a WSJ editorial in 2011 linked below. Why wouldn't scientists be excited to answer that question?

Simple example presented, let's say you flip a coin and get heads ten times in a row. Of the competing theories as to why that happened, something about the coin leaning toward heads is a thousand time more likely model (explanation) than it being just the result of random occurrence. (Try it.) In the case of 0.8 degree warming over 150 years, randomness explains it better than the model chosen by the IPCC:----------------

"It is not only the Met Office that has claimed that the increase in global temperatures is statistically significant: the IPCC has as well. Moreover, the IPCC used the same statistical model as the Met Office, in its most-recent Assessment Report (2007). The Assessment Report discusses the choice of model in Volume I, Appendix 3.A. The Appendix correctly acknowledges that, concerning statistical significance, “the results depend on the statistical model used”.

What justification does the Appendix give for choosing the trending autoregressive model? None. In other words, the model used by the IPCC is just adopted by proclamation. Science is supposed to be based on evidence and logic. The failure of the IPCC to present any evidence or logic to support its choice of model is a serious violation of basic scientific principles — indeed, it means that what the IPCC has done is not science.

To conclude, the primary basis for global-warming alarmism is unfounded. The Met Office has been making false claims about the significance of climatic changes to Parliament—as well as to the government, the media, and others — claims which have seriously affected both policies and opinions. When questioned about those claims in Parliament, the Met Office did everything feasible to avoid telling the truth."

This is already case closed and well reported, but I will keep going since our President is still gearing up for another big fight against "global warming". WTF else is 'climate change' if not natural fluctuations or liberal code for slow the economy and 'save the planet'.----- "Since 1998, the warmest year of the twentieth century, temperatures have not kept up with computer models that seemed to project steady warming; they’re perilously close to falling beneath even the lowest projections".

"there's no way around the fact that this reprieve for the planet is bad news for proponents of policies, such as carbon taxes and emissions treaties, meant to slow warming by moderating the release of greenhouse gases. The reality is that the already meagre prospects of these policies, in America at least, will be devastated if temperatures do fall outside the lower bound of the projections that environmentalists have used to create a panicked sense of emergency."

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2013/06/climate-change-----The phony movie 'An Inconvenient Truth' was released in 2006 with cherrypicked data picked by quack scientists to help elect the Pelosi-Reid agenda in congress and elect the Senate's furthest left member to the White House. At the moment of that trickery, we were 8 years into a no warming plateau, impossible according to their own models. Now it is 15 years and counting and we still stop pipelines and fight for backward economic movement.

When the data doesn't fit the model, this crowd 'adjusts' the data instead of scrapping the phony model.

No, you say. Think again.I remember reading in the 1960s about temperatures reaching the 130's. I remember the record in the Guinness Book was in 1922 in Libya. I am wondering why we keep hearing 122 in Death Valley is approaching the World record now. Now I know. The environmentalist have been able to expunge the 1922 record just recently in 2012. Just in time for their media blitz to shove the carbon tax in front of our faces:

The world's highest recorded air temperature is officially recognized by the World Meteorological Organization as 134°F (57.6°C) recorded at Death Valley, California, USA on 10 July 1913.

Note that this is in recorded history. Higher temperatures have occurred, of course, at different times during the 4.55 billion years of Earth's history.

Related Information:

El Azizia, Libya, held this record for decades, after recording a temperature of 136 °F (58°C) on 13 September 1922. It was coincidentally also on 13 September of 2012 that this record was stripped by the WMO after a team of experts determined that there were enough questions surrounding this measurement that this temperature was probably not really recorded.

The temperature had been suspect in atmospheric science circles for a number of reasons. One being that the time of year is inconsistent with such a high reading. Also, the type and exposure of the measuring instruments cast doubt on the accuracy of the data. However, other temperatures in the same general area approach that maximum, especially in the cloudless southern Sahara, far from the moderating effects of water. Several links are provided below for more information on this process.

Other Earth Temperature Highs:

The modern, most reliably recorded air temperature at Death Valley was 129°F (54°C) on 7/20/1960, 7/18/1998, 7/20/2005, and 7/7/2007. Still, the hottest in the Western Hemisphere.

The highest naturally occurring temperature (at Earth's core) is higher than the melting point of iron and is estimated to be approximately 5000°C.

The highest temperature ever created in a laboratory experiment: Scientists, using the Z machine, have produced plasma at temperatures of more than 2 billion degrees Kelvin (3.6 billion degrees F) at Sandia National Laboratories, located near Albuquerque New Mexico.

Dasht-e Lut, a desert in southeastern Iran, was identified as having the hottest surface temperature (not air temperature) of 70.7 degrees C (159 degrees F) This was only during the years of study in 2004 and 2005 by MODIS, which is a satellite remote sensor, mounted on NASA satellites Aqua and Terra.

Caveats to the Above:

Modern measuring methods, instruments, and techniques are more sophisticated and standardized today. Example: The World Meteorological Organization, recommends that air temperatures be measured at a height of 1.25 to 2 meters (4.1010 to 6.5617 feet) above ground level.

The most likely places on Earth for record high temperatures are in depressions in desert regions, especially in areas below sea level. The Dallol (Danakil) Depression in Africa (Ethiopia), Death Valley in USA, and the area around Lake Eyre in Australia are likely candidates. However, the Gobi Desert's temperatures, while far from any ocean, are mitigated by altitude. The Dallol (Danakil) Depression had a weather station for a short while, only a few years, that was run by a mining company. It wasn't there long enough to measure an extreme maximum to beat the Libyan record, although it did measure very high mean average temperatures while it operated.

The thing to remember about very hot places, is that data is sparse. This is because very few people with high levels of technology stay in these places for long. The environment of the Danikil Depression is inimical (hostile) to human life.****

First, a comment or two to the above regarding Death Valley, Vegas in summer etc.: Records are in the context of how short a time we have measured and measured accurately. Also, they are in the context that here we just had a record long and cold winter, as did China, Russia and other places. Good reporting would be that it is hot out, or cold out in a particular place, not that the planet is turning to molten rock - unless it is. How much air conditioning did Vegas have 50 or 100 years ago? If Vegas would prohibit air conditioning, which puts more heat outside than cold air inside, the outdoor temps in summer would not be so bad. Just a thought. Fewer people would fly there, hence less greenhouse gas. We make choices.------------

From the Times of London: “Global Warming Has a Bright Side”:

A SURGE in global temperatures caused by greenhouse gas emissions could create a boost for parts of the British economy, a government report will suggest this week.

The National Adaptation programme, to be published tomorrow by Defra, the environment ministry, will suggest that farming, forestry and tourism will all benefit from warmer summers, while shipping will profit from the shorter sea routes caused by the melting of the ice caps.

It will even say that rising warmth might boost Britons’ health, encouraging them to spend more time outdoors, where exposure to sunshine would boost vitamin D levels.

And the Telegraph reports:

Climate change will be good for British farming, according to Caroline Spelman, the Environment Secretary, with exotic crops such as melons already thriving. In a speech at the Oxford Farming Conference, she said that, although problems such as droughts would become more frequent, warmer weather would also mean a longer growing season and less frost damage, allowing the introduction of crops such as peaches, maize and sunflowers. Already 10,000 melons are expected to be harvested in Kent this year.

Interesting stories at the link, CCP. If I unplug a freezer (global warming), I don't find that some ice cube trays freeze and some thaw. Everything gets warmer. The earth's systems and patterns are more complicated. We are talking about tenths and hundredths of a degree of alleged change over an entire planet, a far smaller change than our ability to measure.

Some say a glacier may increase as it warms because of more snowfall. But they tell you that any loss of glacial ice is due to global warming, because of humans, even if the trend line precedes human industrialization. Winter here was 2 months longer this year than last year, proof of nothing more than natural fluctuation. The ocean level goes up more in a day with tide than in a century due to global warming.

I love the examples of counter-trends just as an answer to the naive people, such as our President, who give 2 or 3 anecdotal examples as proof of global warming. Anecdotal examples, such as noticeably warmer now than when you were a kid, are false. You can't feel a rate of warmer of a half a degree a century. Your body adjusts faster than that.

Headlines from CCP's link:British press acknowledg​es Antarctic ice at record high levelsAntarctic sea-ice extent 193,000 sq miles higher than averageSweden’s Kebnekaise glacier now growingMany Himalayan glaciers advancing rather than melting, study findsGlaciers on Asia’s largest mountain range getting BIGGERArctic Ice Extent Shatters More RecordsHimalayas have lost no ice in past 10 years, study showsGlaciers are growing on Kilimanjaro, guide insists

In the final paragraph the impression is being made that this is a "global warming" problem. From what I read the glaciers on the West of Antarctica are shrinking but are getting larger on the East Side. It is admitted the phenomenon of large ice breaks from glaciers is poorly understood. Yet the global warming crowd will seize on this and use it as armament for their cause of the day.

Very funny title. Fox News should read the forum and they wouldn't be so surprised.----

News at the link below from the global warming crowd, they are now explaining the lack of warming over the last 15 years before they have admitted the lack of warming over the last 15 years. The explanation was that it all went into the oceans. But the models said warming is LINKED to CO2. The 'scientists' said the earth has no mechanism to handle 400 ppm or more and warming would spiral upward until civilization was flooded over. Oh well. Keep the research money coming nonetheless. Lack of global warming means we have even more to fear.

Illustration mapping the steady decline in sunspot activity over the last two solar cycles with predicted figures for the current cycle 24

The sun is acting bizarrely and scientists have no idea why. Solar activity is in gradual decline, a change from the norm which in the past triggered a 300-year-long mini ice age.

Three leading solar scientists presented the very latest data about the weakening solar activity at a teleconference yesterday in Boulder, Colorado, organised by the American Astronomical Society. It featured experts from Nasa, the High Altitude Observatory and the National Solar Observatory who described how solar activity, as measured by the formation of sunspots and by massive explosions on the sun’s surface, has been falling steadily since the mid-1940s....“It is the smallest solar maximum we have seen in 100 years,” said Dr David Hathaway of Nasa.

Guy Callendar was a superb scientist and an expert on the physics of steam. He wrote a seminal article in 1938 on the potential for increasing levels of CO2 to warm the atmosphere:

Callendar posited a logarithmic relationship between concentration of CO2 and global temperatures, as shown in this graph:

By Callendar’s calculation, a doubling in CO2 from 300 ppm to 600 ppm would cause about a 1.7 degree C increase in atmospheric temperature. What is interesting about this is that Callender’s calculations track much more closely with actual temperatures than the formulas that are used by alarmists today. The reason is that the alarmists’ models build in hypothetical positive feedback effects in order to generate greater temperature impacts. Steve McIntyre explains: (http://climateaudit.org/2013/07/26/guy-callendar-vs-the-gcms/)

It is completely bizarre that a simple reconstruction from Callendar out-performs the CMIP5 GCMs – and, for most of them, by a lot. … Even if the Callendar parameters had been calculated using the observed temperature history, it is surely surprising that such a simple formula can out-perform the GCMs, especially given the enormous amount of time, resources and effort expended in these GCMs. And, yes, I recognize that GCMs provide much more information than GLB temperature, but GLB temperature is surely the most important single statistic yielded by these models and it is disquieting that the GCMs have no skill relative to a reconstruction using only the Callendar 1938 formula. As Mosher observed in a comment on the predecessor post, a more complicated model ought to be able to advance beyond the simple model and, if there is a deterioration in performance, there’s something wrong with the model.

Emphasis added. The modest temperature increase suggested by Callendar, and validated so far by observation, poses no threat, and won’t bring about any of the catastrophic consequences that the alarmists are paid to predict. Callendar himself thought the effect of increasing CO2 in the atmosphere would be salutary:

It may be said that the combustion of fossil fuel, whether it be peat from the surface or oil from 10,000 feet below, is likely to prove beneficial to mankind in several ways, besides the provision of heat and power. For instance the above mentioned small increases of mean temperature would be important at the northern margin of cultivation, and the growth of favourably situated plants is directly proportional to the carbon dioxide pressure (Brown and Escombe, 1905): In any case the return of the deadly glaciers should be delayed indefinitely.

It is somewhat ironic that the “science” of global warming has regressed since 1938.

By Patrick J. MichaelsResponse EssaysAugust 12, 2013CommentsTerence Kealey’s insightful essay is likely to provoke a vigorous debate among libertarians on the utility of publicly funded science. He concludes that “the public funding of research has no beneficial effects on the economy.” I will argue that the situation, at least in a prominent environmental science, is worse, inasmuch as the more public money is disbursed, the poorer the quality of the science, and that there is a direct cause-and-effect relationship.

This is counter to the reigning myth that science, as a search for pure truth, is ultimately immune from incentivized distortion. In fact, at one time James M. Buchanan clearly stated that he thought science was one of the few areas that was not subject to public choice influences. In his 1985 essay The Myth of Benevolence, Buchanan wrote:

Science is a social activity pursued by persons who acknowledge the existence of a nonindividualistic, mutually agreed-on value, namely truth…Science cannot, therefore, be modelled in the contractarian, or exchange, paradigm.”

In reality, public choice influences on science are pervasive and enforced through the massive and entrenched bureaucracies of higher education. The point of origin is probably President Franklin Roosevelt’s November 17, 1944 letter to Vannevar Bush, who, as director of the wartime Office of Scientific Research and Development, managed and oversaw the Manhattan Project.

Roosevelt expressed a clear desire to expand the reach of the government far beyond theoretical and applied physics, specifically asking Bush, “What can the Government do now and in the future to aid research activities by public and private organizations.” In response, in July, 1945, Bush published Science, The Endless Frontier, in which he explicitly acknowledged Roosevelt’s more inclusive vision, saying,

It is clear from President Roosevelt’s letter that in speaking of science that he had in mind the natural sciences, including biology and medicine…

Bush’s 1945 report explicitly laid the groundwork for the National Science Foundation, the modern incarnation of the National Institutes of Health, and the proliferation of federal science support through various federal agencies. But, instead of employing scientists directly as the Manhattan Project did, Bush proposed disbursing research support to individuals via their academic employers.

Universities saw this as a bonanza, adding substantial additional costs. A typical public university imposes a 50% surcharge on salaries and fringe benefits (At private universities the rate can approach 70%.)

These fungible funds often support faculty in the many university departments that do not recover all of their costs; thus does the Physics Department often support, say, Germanic Languages. As a result, the universities suddenly became wards of the federal government and in the thrall of extensive programmatic funding. The roots of statist “political correctness” lie as much in the economic interests of the academy as they do in the political predilections of the faculty.

As an example, I draw attention to my field of expertise, which is climate change science and policy. The Environmental Protection Agency claims to base its global warming regulations on “sound” science, in which the federal government is virtually the sole provider of research funding. In fact, climate change science and policy is a highly charged political arena, and its $2 billion/year public funding would not exist save for the perception that global warming is very high on the nation’s priority list.

The universities and their federal funders have evolved a codependent relationship. Again, let’s use climate change as an example. Academic scientists recognize that only the federal government provides the significant funds necessary to publish enough original research to gain tenure in the higher levels of academia. Their careers therefore depend on it. Meanwhile, the political support for elected officials who hope to gain from global warming science will go away if science dismisses the issue as unimportant.

The culture of exaggeration and the disincentives to minimize scientific/policy problems are an unintended consequence of the way we now do science, which is itself a direct descendent of Science, The Endless Frontier.

All the disciplines of science with policy implications (and this is by far most of them) compete with each other for finite budgetary resources, resources that are often allocated via various congressional committees, such as those charged with responsibilities for environmental science, technology, or medical research. Thus each of the constituent research communities must engage in demonstrations that their scientific purview is more important to society than those of their colleagues in other disciplines. So, using this example, global warming inadvertently competes with cancer research and others.

Imagine if a NASA administrator at a congressional hearing, upon being asked if global warming were of sufficient importance to justify a billion dollars in additional funding, replied that it really was an exaggerated issue, and the money should be spent elsewhere on more important problems.

It is a virtual certainty that such a reply would be one of his last acts as administrator.

So, at the end of this hypothetical hearing, having answered in the affirmative (perhaps more like, “hell yes, we can use the money”), the administrator gathers all of his department heads and demands programmatic proposals from each. Will any one of these individuals submit one which states that his department really doesn’t want the funding because the issue is perhaps exaggerated?

It is a virtual certainty that such a reply would be one of his last acts as a department head.

The department heads now turn to their individual scientists, asking for specific proposals on how to put the new monies to use. Who will submit a proposal with the working research hypothesis that climate change isn’t all that important?

It is a virtual certainty that such a reply would guarantee he was in his last year as a NASA scientist.

Now that the funding has been established and disbursed, the research is performed under the obviously supported hypotheses (which may largely be stated as “it’s worse than we thought”). When the results are submitted to a peer-reviewed journal, they are going to be reviewed by other scientists who, being prominent in the field of climate change by virtue of their research productivity, are funded by the same process. They have little incentive to block any papers consistent with the worsening hypothesis and every incentive to block one that concludes the opposite.

Can this really be true? After all, what I have sketched here is simply an hypothesis that public choice is fostering a pervasive “it’s worse than we thought” bias in the climate science literature, with the attendant policy distortions that must result from relying upon that literature.

It is an hypothesis that tests easily.

Let us turn to a less highly charged field in applied science to determine how to test the hypothesis of pervasive bias, namely the pedestrian venue of the daily weather forecast.

Short-range weather models and centennial-scale climate models are largely based upon the same physics derived from the six interacting “primitive equations” describing atmospheric motion and thermodynamics. The difference is that, in the weather forecasting models, the initial conditions change, being a simultaneous sample of global atmospheric pressure, temperature, and moisture in three dimensions, measured by ascending weather balloons and, increasingly, by downward-sounding satellites. This takes place twice a day. The “boundary conditions,” such as solar irradiance and the transfer of radiation through the atmosphere, do not change. In a climate model, the base variables are calculated, rather than measured, and the boundary conditions—such as the absorption of infrared radiation in various layers of the atmosphere (the “greenhouse effect”) change over time.

It is assumed that the weather forecasting model is unbiased—without remaining systematic errors—so that each run, every twelve hours, has an equal probability of predicting, say, that it will be warmer or colder next Friday than the previous run. If this were not he case, then the chance of warmer or colder is unequal. In fact, in the developmental process for forecast models, the biases are subtracted out and the output is forced to have a bias of zero and therefore an equal probability of a warmer or colder forecast.

Similarly, if the initial results are unbiased, successive runs of climate models should have an equal probability of producing centennial forecasts that are warmer or colder than previous one, or projecting more or less severe climate impacts. It is a fact that the climate change calculated by these models is not a change from current or past conditions, but is the product of subtracting the output of the model with low greenhouse-gas concentrations from the one with higher ones. Consequently the biasing errors have been subtracted out, a rather intriguing trick. Again, the change is one model minus another, not the standard “predicted minus observed.”

The climate research community actually believes its models are zero-biased. An amicus brief in the landmark Supreme Court case Massachusetts v. EPA, by a number of climate scientists claiming to speak for the larger community, explicitly stated this as fact:

Outcomes may turn out better than our best current prediction, but it is just as possible that environmental and health damages will be more severe than best predictions…”

The operative words are “just as possible,” indicating that climate scientists believe they are immune to public choice influences.

This is testable, and I ran such a test, publishing it in an obscure journal, Energy & Environment, in 2008. I, perhaps accurately, hypothesized that a paper severely criticizing the editorial process at Science and Nature, the two most prestigious general science journals worldwide, was not likely to be published in such prominent places.

I examined the 115 articles that had appeared in both of these journals during a 13-month period in 2006 and 2007, classifying them as either “worse than we thought,” “better,” or “neutral or cannot determine.” 23 were neutral and removed from consideration. 9 were “better” and 83 were “worse.” Because of the hypothesis of nonbiased equiprobability, this is equivalent to tossing a coin 92 times and coming up with 9 or fewer heads or tails. The probability that this would occur in an unbiased sample can be calculated from the binomial probability distribution, and the result is striking. There would have to be 100,000,000,000,000,000 iterations of the 92 tosses for there to be merely a 50% chance that one realization of 9 or fewer heads or tails would be observed.

In subsequent work, I recently assembled a much larger sample of the scientific literature and, while the manuscript is in preparation, I can state that my initial result appears to be robust.

Kealey tells us that there is no relationship between the wealth of nations and the amount of money that taxpayers spend on scientific research. In reality, it is in fact “worse than he thought.” At least in a highly politicized field such as global warming science and policy, the more money the public spends, the worse is the quality of the science.

A rare BBG sighting in this thread yesterday, take a look! "State-Funded Science: It’s Worse Than You Think!"----------------------

Apparently the reason the world did not explode and people didn't suffocate at 400 ppm (parts per million) CO2 is because we missed it. Next summer for sure! Wrap up you unfinished business. It's still coming.

...the five reservoirs of carbon all are in close contact — the atmosphere, the upper level of the ocean, the land vegetation, the topsoil, and the fossil fuels. They are all about equal in size. They all interact with each other strongly. So you can’t understand any of them unless you understand all of them. Essentially that was the conclusion. It’s a problem of very complicated ecology, and to isolate the atmosphere and the ocean just as a hydrodynamics problem makes no sense.

Syukuro Manabe, right here in Princeton, was the first person who did climate models with enhanced carbon dioxide and they were excellent models. And he used to say very firmly that these models are very good tools for understanding climate, but they are not good tools for predicting climate. I think that’s absolutely right. They are models, but they don’t pretend to be the real world. They are purely fluid dynamics. You can learn a lot from them, but you cannot learn what’s going to happen 10 years from now.

What’s wrong with the models... the basic problem is that in the case of climate, very small structures, like clouds, dominate. And you cannot model them in any realistic way. They are far too small and too diverse.

So they say, ‘We represent cloudiness by a parameter,’ but I call it a fudge factor. So then you have a formula, which tells you if you have so much cloudiness and so much humidity, and so much temperature, and so much pressure, what will be the result... But if you are using it for a different climate, when you have twice as much carbon dioxide, there is no guarantee that that’s right. There is no way to test it.

...enhanced carbon dioxide has a drastic effect on plants because it is the main food source for the plants... So if you change the carbon dioxide drastically by a factor of two, the whole behavior of the plant is different. Anyway, that’s so typical of the things they ignore. They are totally missing the biological side, which is probably more than half of the real system.

...it’s a fact that they don’t know how to model it. And the question is, how does it happen that they end up believing their models? But I have seen that happen in many fields. You sit in front of a computer screen for 10 years and you start to think of your model as beingreal. It is also true that the whole livelihood of all these people depends on people being scared. Really, just psychologically, it would be very difficult for them to come out and say, “Don’t worry, there isn’t a problem.” It’s sort of natural, since their whole life depends on it being a problem. I don’t say that they’re dishonest. But I think it’s just a normal human reaction.

"...enhanced carbon dioxide has a drastic effect on plants because it is the main food source for the plants... So if you change the carbon dioxide drastically by a factor of two, the whole behavior of the plant is different. Anyway, that’s so typical of the things they ignore. They are totally missing the biological side, which is probably more than half of the real system."

Yes liberal environmentalists almost ignore the benefit to plants of rising CO2.The Greens are *waging war* on plants by trying to choke them to death by reducing CO2. If only plants could vote......

The first time I read anything about plants doing better is this article that picks on a single plant only to further their agenda:

****Poison Ivy is Growing Out of Control, Thanks to Climate Change

Sean Breslin Published: Jul 24, 2013, 2:55 PM EDT weather.com

Poison ivy. (Flickr/Diego3336)

A rising carbon dioxide level is bad for many things on our planet, but there's one plant that eats it up like candy: poison ivy.

Higher levels of carbon dioxide benefit the growth of all plants, yet poison ivy seems to be enjoying it more than most, reports the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Poison ivy's growth and potency has doubled since the 1960s, the newspaper reports. With CO2 rates expected to rise from 400 parts per million to 560 ppm in the next 30 to 50 years, it could double again.

If carbon dioxide levels reach 800 ppm by the end of the century, as the report suggests they could, poison ivy would become even more prevalent.

"Poison ivy and vines in general really, really benefit from higher atmospheric CO2," Jacqueline Mohan, assistant professor of biology at the University of Georgia, told the Post-Gazette.

According to Sustainable Business, poison ivy leaves have grown as big as pie pans in some parts of the country. Bears, deer and other animals that eat the plants won't experience a food shortage in the coming years.

The creatures' voracious appetite for the plant should lessen the chance of humans experiencing serious reactions to the ivy's oil, known as urushiol.

The enhanced poison ivy won't just threaten humans with its rash-creating oil, it could also kill trees at a faster pace. Sustainable Business also mentions that the plant can quickly crawl up trees and starve them, and when combined with the possibility that climate change could cause more intense wildfires, there could be more fuel for blazes if more dead trees are in the path.

A Grist article notes poison ivy is one of few plants thriving in the forests along the South Carolina coast. Then, to demonstrate the enhanced nature of a 21st-century attack, the piece concludes by documenting the trials of climate and energy blogger David Roberts, affected by a recent bout with poison ivy.

The frustration and likelihood of a brush with urushiol will only grow, affecting more people, until poison ivy's carbon dioxide food supply is slowed and eventually choked off.****

"The first time I read anything about plants doing better is this article that picks on a single plant only to further their agenda:****Poison Ivy is Growing Out of Control, Thanks to Climate Change"

In our untouched forests I actually see less poison ivy than when I was a kid. CO2 is a factor; so is heat, shade, water. But yes, isn't it funny that was the only thing they could think of, not that enhanced CO2 is helping to feed the planet or the other most obvious point: Increased plant growth is a negative feedback factor preventing the dreaded spiraling effect. The higher the CO2 level, the higher the rate CO2 is removed from the atmosphere by plants. Who knew?!

There is a website I have watched for a long time called CO2Science.org (http://www.co2science.org/) that rather than denying warming or enhanced CO2 levels, just studies, publishes and editorializes on the mostly positive impact of it.

in "part of the US". I am sure everyone who reads this board knows why I post in this thread. I would have been completely totally shocked if I got through this article and there was no mention of "climate change". Sure enough far down is the implication this is due to climate change. And we are all being brainwashed to assume of course the change is due to man destroying his/her/gay/transgenders/gender neutral's environment. (I am not sure which pronoun is correct so as not to offend I include a variety).

I recall my whole life that whenever we have more rain the mosquitoes have a field day. So what's new? NOTHING. Just more propaganda. The good part of this is now I remember how to spell mosquito.Is it "mosquito"? Is it "m*i*squito*e*" or "mosquitoe"?:

****Mosquitoes are worse this summer in parts of US

This undated handout photo provided by the Agriculture Department shows a female yellowfever mosquito probes a piece of Limburger cheese, one of few known mosquito attractants. Despite our size and technological advantages, we still can't seem to win our ancient blood battle with the pesky and lethal mosquito. In much of the nation this summer you can tell just by looking at the itchy bumps on our arms. A large section of the United States seems like it is getting eaten alive worse than usual this summer because of quirks in recent weather. It may be the worst in the Southeast, where after two years of drought when mosquito eggs laid dormant, there have been incredibly heavy rains much of the spring and summer. Rainfall in parts of North Carolina is more than two feet above normal this year. The rains have revived the dormant eggs, so the region is essentially getting three years' worth of mosquitoes in one summer. (AP Photo/Peggy Greb, USDA)

Associated Press SETH BORENSTEIN 21 hours ago Florida

WASHINGTON (AP) — The tiny mosquito all too often has man on the run. And this summer, it seems even worse than usual.

"You can't get from the car to inside our house without getting attacked, it's that bad," high school teacher Ryan Miller said from his home in Arlington, Va. Minutes earlier, he saw a mosquito circling his 4-month-old daughter — indoors.

Experts say it's been a buggier-than-normal summer in many places around the U.S. because of a combination of drought, heavy rain and heat.

It may be worst in the Southeast, which is getting hit with three years' worth of bugs in one summer, said Jonathan Day, who studies insects at the University of Florida.

Two years of drought were followed by incredibly heavy rain this year. During dry spells, mosquito eggs often didn't get wet enough to hatch. This year's rain revived those, along with the normal 2013 batch.

In parts of Connecticut this summer, mosquito traps had double the usual number of bugs. Minnesota traps in July had about triple the 10-year average. And in central California, traps had five times as many of one key species as the recent average.

Humans have been battling the blood-drinking bugs for thousands of years, and despite man's huge advantages in technology and size, people are not getting the upper hand. Just lots of bites on the hand.

"We have to keep fighting just to hold our own," said Tom Wilmot, past president of the Mosquito Control Association and a Michigan mosquito control district chief. And in some places, he said, the mosquitoes are winning.

In southwestern Florida around Fort Myers, Lee County mosquito control was getting more than 300 calls per day from residents at times this summer, a much higher count than usual. But the more impressive tally was the number of bugs landing on inspectors' unprotected legs: more than 100 a minute in some hotspots, said deputy director Shelly Radovan.

Across Florida near Vero Beach, Roxanne Connelly said there have been some days this month when she just wouldn't go in the backyard. It's been too bad even for her — and she's a mosquito researcher at the University of Florida and head of the mosquito association.

Many communities fight back by spraying pesticides, but mosquitoes are starting to win that battle, too, developing resistance to these chemicals. Soon many places could be out of effective weapons, Connelly and other mosquito-fighters said.

Miller, who teaches environmental sciences, said he normally would oppose spraying but has been lobbying for the county to break out the pesticides this year. The county told him there was no money in the budget and recommended he hire a private pest control business, he said.

The type that buzzed his daughter — the Asian tiger mosquito, named for its striped body — hit the U.S. a quarter-century ago in a batch of imported scrap tires in Houston and eventually spread to the Northeast, the Midwest and, in 2011, the Los Angeles area.

Climate change is also likely to worsen mosquito problems in general because the insects tend to do better in the hotter weather that experts forecast, said Chet Moore, a professor of medical entomology at Colorado State University.

Mosquitoes, of course, can be more than a nuisance: They can spread diseases. In the U.S., the biggest mosquito-borne threat is West Nile virus. Last year, there were a record 286 West Nile deaths, but this year appears to be milder.

Worldwide outside the United States, mosquito-borne diseases kill far more people than sharks, snakes and bears combined, with more than 600,000 deaths from malaria each year in poorer countries.

People should wear light-colored clothing — dark colors attract mosquitoes — long pants and long sleeves; get rid of standing water, where mosquitoes breed; and use repellents with the chemical DEET, experts said.

But even those substances may not work for long. Mosquitoes could be developing resistance to repellents as well as insecticides, said mosquito researcher James Logan at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

"It's an arms race," he said. "I always think they are one step ahead of us."****

“As a result of the Sun entering a ‘hibernation’ phase, the Space and Science Research Corporation hereby declares that the past two hundred years of global sea level rise is expected to end no earlier than mid-2014 and no later than 2020. After that time, global sea levels are expected to begin a long term period of decline, lasting at least through the decade of the 2030’s. The estimated global sea level decline during that period will range from 20 to 25 cm from current levels.”

Seeing how "global warming" seems to have lost some of it's lexicographic shizzle leaving a gap "climate change" doesn't have the spark to fill, perhaps the doomsayers should give "weather cooking" a whirl. Hey, not only has it worked before, but if we manage to dispense with modern follyswaddles we could inspire those rotten deniers to STFU:

BBG, Amazing how backward the thinking was 500 years ago, and amazing what a short distance we have come since. To everyone else, watch the video. 7 minutes with a history professor (I presume) to learn a lot about what was happening centuries ago.

Update on global warming:

Satellite data set RSS shows no warming over the last 16 years and 8 months, with a cooling trend currently in progress:

Fewest 100+ degree readings at temperature stations in 100 years in the US:

Nonetheless, here is Presidential confidant, flaming liberal, husband of UN Ambassador Samantha Power, Cass Sunstein, writing as if it is 1600 again. Shall we have a witch trial?

With respect to the science of climate change, many experts regard the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as the world’s authoritative institution. A draft summary of its forthcoming report was leaked last week. It describes the panel’s growing confidence that climate change is real, that it is a result of human action, and that if the world continues on its current course, it will face exceedingly serious losses and threats (including a significant rise in sea levels by century’s end).

While the draft report states these conclusions with unprecedented conviction, they are broadly consistent with the panel’s judgments from the past two decades, which raises an obvious question: Why have so many nations (including China and the U.S., the world’s leading greenhouse-gas emitters) not done more in response?

There are many answers. Skeptics say that the IPCC is biased and wrong. Companies whose economic interests are at stake continue to fight against regulatory controls. The leaders of some nations think that if they acted unilaterally to reduce their emissions, they would impose significant costs on their citizens without doing much to reduce climate change. Especially in a difficult economic period, they don’t think it makes sense to act on their own.

To this extent, the real challenge lies in producing an international agreement. It isn’t easy to obtain a consensus on the timing and expense of reductions, especially because developing nations (including China) insist that developed nations (including the U.S.) are obliged to take the most costly steps toward reducing emissions.Psychological Barriers

All of these positions play a major role. But we should not disregard purely psychological factors. An understanding of what human beings fear -- and what they do not -- helps to explain why nations haven’t insisted on more significant emissions reductions.

The first obstacle is that people tend to evaluate risks by way of “the availability heuristic,” which leads them to assess the probability of harm by asking whether a readily available example comes to mind. An act of terrorism, for example, is likely to be both available and salient, and hence makes people fear that another such event will occur (whether it is likely to or not). So, too, a recent crime or accident can activate attention and significantly inflate people’s assessment of risk.

By contrast, climate change is difficult to associate with any particular tragedy or disaster. To be sure, many scientists think that climate change makes extreme weather events, such as Hurricane Sandy, substantially more likely. But it is hard to prove that climate change “caused” any particular event, and as a result, the association tends to be at best speculative in many people’s minds.

Second, people tend to be especially focused on risks or hazards that have an identifiable perpetrator, and for that reason produce outrage. Warmer temperatures are a product not of any particular human being or group, but the interaction between nature and countless decisions by countless people. There are no obvious devils or demons -- no individuals who intend to create the harms associated with climate change. For terrorism, a “we-they” narrative fits the facts; in the context of climate change, those who are the solution might well also be, or seem to be, the problem. In these circumstances, public outrage is much harder to fuel.

Third, human beings are far more attentive to immediate threats than to long-term ones. Behavioral scientists have emphasized that in their private lives, people sometimes display a form of myopia. They may neglect the future, seeing it as a kind of foreign country, one they may not ever visit. For this reason, they might fail to save for retirement, or they might engage in risk-taking behavior (such as smoking or unhealthy eating) that will harm their future selves.

Future Threat

In a political context, citizens might demand protection against a risk that threatens them today, tomorrow or next month. But if they perceive climate change as mostly a threat to future generations -- if significant sea-level rises seem to be decades away -- they are unlikely to have a sense of urgency.

Climate change lacks other characteristics that spur public concern about risks. It is gradual rather than sudden. The idea of warmer climates doesn’t produce anger, revulsion or disgust. Depletion of the ozone layer was probably the most closely analogous environmental concern; public attention to that problem was easier to mobilize because of fears of a huge rise in skin cancer.

In this light, it should not be surprising if people don’t get much exercised by the IPCC’s forthcoming report. All the obstacles are daunting -- skepticism about the science, economic self-interest, and the difficulties of designing cost-effective approaches and obtaining an international agreement. But the world is unlikely to make much progress on climate change until the barrier of human psychology is squarely addressed.

The Northwest Passage after decades of so-called global warming has a dramatic 60% more Arctic ice this year than at the same time last year. The future dreams of dozens of adventurous sailors are now threatened. A scattering of yachts attempting the legendary Passage are caught by the ice, which has now become blocked at both ends and the transit season may be ending early. Douglas Pohl tells the story:

The Passage has become blocked with 5/10 concentrated drifting sea ice at both the eastern and at the western ends of Canada’s Arctic Archipelago. At least 22 yachts and other vessels are in the Arctic at the moment. Some who were less advanced have retreated and others have abandoned their vessels along the way. Still others are caught in the ice in an unfolding, unresolved drama.

The real question is if and when the Canadian Coast Guard(CCG) decides to take early action to help the yachts exit the Arctic before freeze-up... or will they wait until it becomes an emergency rescue operation?

The first blockage area is at Prince Regent Inlet in position 73.7880535N, -89.2529297W which became blocked on 27th August with 5/10 ice concentration with 7/10 ice pushing.

This effectively closes the 2013 Northwest Passage without Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker escorts for transit. The alternative is a very technical and risky southern navigation through Fury & Hecla Strait mostly blocked with sea ice.

Currently there is a commercial cruise ship on a west to east passage which will reach Prince Regent Inlet in another day. It is unknown if there is a CCG icebreaker in the area to provide assistance since government ships do not provide Automatic Identification Service (AIS) to public AIS websites.

Since one of the Canadian Coast Guard’s prime missions is to provide icebreaking for commercial shipping it will be interesting to see if Canada Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Government views this as an opportunity for good public relations to help recreational yachts transiting the Northwest Passage.

Another choke-point stopping marine traffic is on the western Canadian Arctic at Cape Bathurst in position 70.6672443N, -128.2763672W which became blocked on 26th August with 2/10 ice concentration and quickly filled with 5/10 ice on 27th August and today has 8/10 ice pushing towards Cape Bathurst. Latest word is the ice is retreating at an agonizing 1 nautical mile per day northward.

There are a number of yachts known to be in the Cambridge Bay area heading west: ACALEPHE (CA), ISATIS (NEW CALEDONIA), LA BELLE EPOQUE (DE), LIBELLULE (CHE), NOEME (FRA), and TRAVERSAY III (CA). PAS PERDU LE NORD (DE) was ahead by 10 days and has already gone on to Arctic Alaska waters. While BALTHAZAR (CA) departed from Inuvik a month ago and is now on the hard in Nome Alaska.

The following yachts are enroute from the west to the east: ANNA (?), rowboat ARCTIC JOULE (CA), DODO'S DELIGHT (GBR), EMPIRICUS (USA). rowboat FAIRMONT's PASSION (USA), tandem-kayak IKIMAYIA (CA), in Russian sea ice is LADY DANA (POL), POLAR BOUND (GBR), rowboat ROWING ICE (FRA), in Russian sea ice is TARA (FRA), and a group of jetskis known as DANGEROUS WATERS (USA) reported east of Gjoa Haven.

Several updates on known others: LE MANGUIER (FRA) is wintering over in the ice at Paulatuk. Motor Yacht Lady M II (Marshal Islands) was escorted by CCGS icebreaker HENRY LARSEN through Bellot Strait eastbound on 20130824. ARCTIC TERN (GBR) and TOOLUKA (NED) retreated to the east towards Greenland/Newfoundland away from Bellot Strait on 20130822 with the opinion that the Arctic ice was finished melting and freeze-up would prevent them from reaching the Northwest Passage finish line at the Arctic Circle in the Bering Strait.

Who could have seen this coming? Ice in the Arctic, varying weather conditions! The humanitarian thing to do might be to rescue the people and leave equipment removal to their own insurance companies or personal resources.

a new study says climate change could eventually help safeguard the U.S. Atlantic Coast from hurricanes.

Climate change might alter atmospheric conditions so that future hurricanes may be pushed away from the East Coast, according to a study published Monday by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

By the next century, the study's authors report, atmospheric winds over the Atlantic could blow more directly from west to east during hurricane season, pushing storms away from the United States.

The study was conducted by meteorologists Elizabeth Barnes at Colorado State University; Lorenzo M. Polvani of Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York; and Adam H. Sobelband at Columbia University.

Almost a million more square miles of ocean covered with ice than in 2012 BBC reported in 2007 global warming would leave Arctic ice-free in summer by 2013 Publication of UN climate change report suggesting global warming caused by humans pushed back to later this month

A chilly Arctic summer has left nearly a million more square miles of ocean covered with ice than at the same time last year – an increase of 60 per cent.

The rebound from 2012’s record low comes six years after the BBC reported that global warming would leave the Arctic ice-free in summer by 2013.

Instead, days before the annual autumn re-freeze is due to begin, an unbroken ice sheet more than half the size of Europe already stretches from the Canadian islands to Russia’s northern shores.

Some eminent scientists now believe the world is heading for a period of cooling that will not end until the middle of this century – a process that would expose computer forecasts of imminent catastrophic warming as dangerously misleading.

The disclosure comes 11 months after The Mail on Sunday triggered intense political and scientific debate by revealing that global warming has ‘paused’ since the beginning of 1997 – an event that the computer models used by climate experts failed to predict.

In March, this newspaper further revealed that temperatures are about to drop below the level that the models forecast with ‘90 per cent certainty’.

The pause – which has now been accepted as real by every major climate research centre – is important, because the models’ predictions of ever-increasing global temperatures have made many of the world’s economies divert billions of pounds into ‘green’ measures to counter climate change.

Those predictions now appear gravely flawed.THERE WON'T BE ANY ICE AT ALL! HOW THE BBC PREDICTED CHAOS IN 2007

Only six years ago, the BBC reported that the Arctic would be ice-free in summer by 2013, citing a scientist in the US who claimed this was a ‘conservative’ forecast. Perhaps it was their confidence that led more than 20 yachts to try to sail the Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific this summer. As of last week, all these vessels were stuck in the ice, some at the eastern end of the passage in Prince Regent Inlet, others further west at Cape Bathurst.

Shipping experts said the only way these vessels were likely to be freed was by the icebreakers of the Canadian coastguard. According to the official Canadian government website, the Northwest Passage has remained ice-bound and impassable all summer.

The BBC’s 2007 report quoted scientist Professor Wieslaw Maslowski, who based his views on super-computer models and the fact that ‘we use a high-resolution regional model for the Arctic Ocean and sea ice’.

He was confident his results were ‘much more realistic’ than other projections, which ‘underestimate the amount of heat delivered to the sea ice’. Also quoted was Cambridge University expert

Professor Peter Wadhams. He backed Professor Maslowski, saying his model was ‘more efficient’ than others because it ‘takes account of processes that happen internally in the ice’.

He added: ‘This is not a cycle; not just a fluctuation. In the end, it will all just melt away quite suddenly.’

The continuing furore caused by The Mail on Sunday’s revelations – which will now be amplified by the return of the Arctic ice sheet – has forced the UN’s climate change body to hold a crisis meeting.

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was due in October to start publishing its Fifth Assessment Report – a huge three-volume study issued every six or seven years. It will now hold a pre-summit in Stockholm later this month.

Leaked documents show that governments which support and finance the IPCC are demanding more than 1,500 changes to the report’s ‘summary for policymakers’. They say its current draft does not properly explain the pause.

At the heart of the row lie two questions: the extent to which temperatures will rise with carbon dioxide levels, as well as how much of the warming over the past 150 years – so far, just 0.8C – is down to human greenhouse gas emissions and how much is due to natural variability.